Pushing Bergger Pancro 400 to 1600

Full disclosure: this is my first time I pushed film. Plus there’s zero information on pushing Bergger and no timings given for Rodinal, so setup your expectations 🙂

When I’ve got two rolls of this film I decided to shoot the first one at the box speed and push the second one. Bergger provides timing for Rodinal developer for the box speed only, but if you want to push it you should either use Bergger Berspeed, which is probably a good idea, or you can do your best guess.

Since I didn’t have Berspeed I decided to make an ‘educated’ guess. I estimated the temperature to time curve for both Rodinal and Berspeed and noticed that Rodinal has a steeper curve.

That means that development time for 1600 iso should also somehow fall into this rule. Then I decided that agitating for 25-30 min is too much and I went with 1+25 dilution. Having this knowledge I checked my crystal ball and Tarot cards and came up with the following timing:

To get +2 stops I should develop in 1+25 dilution at 24ºC for 10 minutes.

I can’t say that results are totally off, but there’s a development error for sure and metering errors on top of that. Nevertheless, results are more than usable. I’ve found that I’ve gotten better shots when I intentionally overexposed the scene at least a half a stop, which is a way to go when you unsure with almost any film.

Will I ever push Pancro 400 again? Definitely yes. Develop in Rodinal? Most probably not. But for those of you who have much more experience that could be a starting point to figure the correct timing.

I usually calculate 30% of the normal development time for each step. If rodinal 1:50 requests 22 minutes at 20 degrees = 28 minutes and a half for the first step and 37 and a little for the second step.
Maybe it’s easier to use Rodinal1: 25!
Regards!

Thanks for your efforts here Dimitry. I have 3 rolls of the Bergger 400 arriving soon and I hope to push it to 1600 as well, and maybe another stop just for fun.
I will be trying a semi stand development in Rodinal at 1+100 for 60 mins with 4 slow inversions at the 30 minute mark. This I hope will flatten out the contrast a little bit and enable me to push to 1600 and 3200 on the same roll. I have no idea if this will work as I have never shot different ISO’s on the one roll, but other bloggers suggest it will. Fingers crossed it works, but that’s the fun of film.
I’ll let you know how it goes.